Archaeologica.org

http://www.oxfordmail.net/display.var.1 ... _found.php

The international team of archaeologists, led by Oxford University's Institute of Archaeology, have found shell beads believed to be 82,000 years old from a limestone cave in Morocco.

Institute director Prof Nick Barton said: "Bead-making in Africa was a widespread practice at the time, which was spread between cultures with different stone technology by exchange or by long-distance social networks.

Wonder what "The Club" has to say about that old an age. If memory serves me, they claim much later dates and also that that kind of culture began in Eurpoe.

How do they come up with those ages?
Which technology when they are going that far back?

I don't know but

The beads themselves comprise 12 Nassarius shells - Nassarius are molluscs found in warm seas and coral reefs in America, Asia and the Pacific - which had holes in them and appeared to have been suspended or hung. They were covered in red ochre.

there's that damn red ochre again.

If HS emerged 200K+ BP, 82K BP for adornments doesn't strike me as excessively early.
In fact, since orangutans and chimps have recently been recognized as having culture, I wouldn't be surprised if they next find those apes use adornments too.
And, were these bead people HS? Or were they HN? Who already buried their dead 150K BP. Or maybe they even were HE?

Wasn't red ochre the first/most available strong, manufacturable color? You get it from heating yellow ochre. Which is basically rust, or iron oxide, that H/G's could find in exposed layers in rockfaces. So red ochre evidences the use of fire for crafting a pre-visualized product. Red ochre is evidence of creativity and a capacity for abstract thinking.

BTW, which humanoid actually used fire first? And when? HE? HN? Or HS?
(And how do we know or infer?)

If you have a free evening, do a search on Red Ocher People.
It is one of those world wide things. Norway to Austrlia, that every one knows about, but no one wants to connect the dots.

And, were these bead people HS? Or were they HN? Who already buried their dead 150K BP. Or maybe they even were HE?

Neanderthal remains have never been found in Africa:


Source: National Geographic

HE apparently survived until 38-53Kya in Indonesia, but nobody is certain when HSS totally replaced HE in Africa and there were likely many different archaic variants on that continent. It isn't popular to give HE the credit for abstract thought since that notion steps on too many paradigms.

A fairly big chunk of that "range" was never particularly cold, Cogs. That kind of argues against Neanderthal evolving as a cold-climate adaptation.

Or, does that step on too many paradigms, too?

Gibraltar was a landbridge. So, if HN lived in Spain, I expect them to have lived in Morocco too.

Yeah, but was it a landbridge when man (or any semblance of him) was around.

I haven't read anything about the Med being dry since the Miocene epoch some 5 million years back.

Here is a link with some more info and one picture of the beads. Great topic btw... this is the stuff that really gets my juices flowing. Here is the link:

http://www.lse.co.uk/ShowStory.asp?stor ... _old_bling

Minimalist wrote:
Yeah, but was it a landbridge when man (or any semblance of him) was around.

20.000 yrs BP, at glacial max, sea levels were 120 meters (400 feet) lower than today.
There was a landbridge allright.

I haven't read anything about the Med being dry since the Miocene epoch some 5 million years back.

I have.
The 'pillars of Hercules' collapsed, breached, in a cataclysmic flood that filled the med basin (which had a couple minor, landlocked seas in the middle up until that time). This is supposed to have happened 9,500 BP. At the end of the ice age. Strongly rising sea levels pressurized the isthmus of Gibraltar (where HN has been established), eventually leading to the breach.
In about 6,500 BP a similar process happened to 'Lake Euxine', when the Bosporus landbridge failed, and the Black Sea was formed.

Rokcet Scientist wrote:
The 'pillars of Hercules' collapsed, breached, in a cataclysmic flood that filled the med basin (which had a couple minor, landlocked seas in the middle up until that time). This is supposed to have happened 9,500 BP. At the end of the ice age. Strongly rising sea levels pressurized the isthmus of Gibraltar (where HN has been established), eventually leading to the breach.
In about 6,500 BP a similar process happened to 'Lake Euxine', when the Bosporus landbridge failed, and the Black Sea was formed.

In fact, there was some discussion about these events being a possible source of the flood stories. Both would have killed a substantial part of the human population around Europe at that time.

Greater and smaller floods have happened over the aeons. And the great river delta dwellers also saw great seasonal floodings almost ever year. All those stories coalesced conveniently into the 'Great Flood' story that so many religions claim.

Sure it happened.
It happened hundreds, if not thousands of times.

zale wrote:
In fact, there was some discussion about these events being a possible source of the flood stories. Both would have killed a substantial part of the human population around Europe at that time.

Most of them probably were not Hollywood type events, with monstrous 'walls of water' engulfing the shrieking populace like a really big tsunami would. Sea levels simply rose fast, changing the coastline from year to year. If you could walk, you could survive. But while 'heading for the hills', as it were, they left whatever they built over thousands of years behind, on 'their' original coastlines. Today a couple hundred feet submerged. The coastlines before sea levels started rising fast at the end of the Würm.